Birmingham's Tommy Dewey creates "Sons of Tucson," a new Fox sitcom

Tommy Dewey has his next acting project lined up. He co-stars with Sarah Chalke (“Scrubs”) in a pilot called “Freshmen,” about freshmen members of Congress living in D.C.

When we last talked with Tommy Dewey, the Mountain Brook High School graduate was preparing for the launch of his TV series “The Mountain” on the WB.

The show didn’t last long, but Dewey didn’t remain idle, guest starring on “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Cold Case” and “Criminal Minds,” among other TV series, and appearing opposite Matthew Perry in the big-screen “17 Again.”

He also was writing, with longtime writing partner Greg Bratman, and their names will be front-and-center tonight as creators of the new “Sons of Tucson,” which airs at 8:30 p.m. on Fox.

Dewey and Bratman, who were acquainted while in college at Princeton, didn’t start working together until both moved to New York in 2001. They did some improv and two-man shows, as well as some off-Broadway work. When Dewey moved to LA and began getting some TV work as an actor, they set their sights on television.

“I knew a few people, so we said, ‘Let’s try writing some TV scripts,’” Dewey says. “So we started cranking. We probably wrote four or five pilots.”

But it was “Sons of Tucson” — about three kids who hire a slacker (Tyler Labine of “Reaper”) to be their fake father when their real one is sent to prison — that was picked up.

“We’re making a go at a family comedy, albeit a very weird family comedy,” says Dewey.

And some of the weirdness was taken from real-life.

“The character that Tyler Labine plays, Ron, when we wrote it, he was somewhere between where Greg and I were in our lives,” the 31-year-old Dewey says. “I was a single guy in Los Angeles trying to figure things out, and Greg had just gotten married and was working on that.”

Does it hit a little too close to home?

“An early draft was very much one of my brothers,” says Dewey, whose mother, Martha DeBuys, father, Sam Dewey, and siblings live in the Birmingham area. “In casting and rewriting, he kind of drifted away, so I’m less nervous than I was after the first draft. I think we’ve disguised it well enough. We’ve hybridized brothers enough.”

Tyler Labine, left, enjoys working with his “Sons of Tucson” “kids”: from left, Matthew Levy, Frank Dolce and Benjamin Stockham. “I get to be a big 16-year-old with them, goofing around all the time,” he says.

It’s the freshness of “Sons of Tucson” that drew Labine to the show.

“It was the character, plus the idea of it all,” he says. “You get really tired of rehashing the same ideas on TV, and this is something I had never really seen on TV.”

That he clicked with Dewey was a bonus.

“The Dew-man,” Labine says. “He’s a good ol’ boy, which I relate to, because I’m the Canadian equivalent of a good ol’ boy. Plus, he’s an actor, so the dialogue is so clean and so good and so natural.”

And the Dew-man says the feeling is mutual.

“I very much feel that way,” says Dewey, who lived in Vancouver while filming “The Mountain.” “All Alabamians should spend some time in Canada and vice versa. We have a lot in common. They’d find a lot of friends there.”

Dewey still has friends and family in Birmingham and tries to get home “a lot.”

He tries to get back for several University of Alabama football games each year but only made it to one last season — the national championship game in Pasadena.

“It was crazy to be surrounded by palm trees in California and a bunch of Roll Tide around,” he says. “There’s not a better day in recent memory. It was really cool.”

Now that “Sons of Tucson” is launching, Dewey is continuing to pursue both his passions. He and Bratman continue to write, and he’ll be acting again soon, filming a pilot, “Freshmen,” that he hopes is picked up this fall.

“I love doing them both,” Dewey says. “They’re two very different beasts. Writing is a marathon, and acting is getting it all together for those high-stake moments when the camera is rolling.”